Monday, 7 December 2015

"Highly recommended!" - Nick Pope's review of "UFOs over Poland"

Nick Pope

by Nick Pope, Ministry of Defence (Ret.)

If you stopped a few people randomly in the street and asked them about UFOs, you'd probably find that some of them had heard about Roswell (and maybe Rendlesham Forest), but that would probably be the extent of their knowledge. With the public, there's often a (mis)perception that the UFO mystery is a peculiarly American phenomenon. Within the UFO community there's a better awareness of the true situation, but despite acknowledgement that there's a lot of activity in countries such as Mexico and Brazil, there's still a US-centric (and to a lesser extent a UK-centric) bias. Part of this is attributable to the language problem, but there's a wider cultural bias issue here too. Which brings us neatly to Piotr Cielebiaś and his thought-provoking book "UFOs over Poland".

The book certainly 'does what it says on the tin', but it's the subtitle, "The Land of High Strangeness", that's really telling, because high strangeness is exactly what we get. This is a real researcher's book, and a very honest one: instead of highlighting only those cases that fit the author's beliefs, Piotr dumps a whole bunch of raw data into the public domain as if to say "Here you go, try to make sense of this lot". Some cases are clearly 'pure' UFO incidents, but others are more paranormal in flavour. For those who naively try to pigeonhole the UFO phenomenon (be they true believers obsessed with the ETH, or die-hard debunkers playing amateur psychologist with muddled theories about folklore, sci-fi, pop culture and Cold War paranoia) this book is a wake-up call, because it eloquently demonstrates that the UFO phenomenon is richer, more complex, more diverse, and much more difficult to define than such narrow-minded thinkers seem to understand.

Piotr's meticulously-researched, well-written and hugely entertaining book is a timely reminder that the UFO phenomenon is global. However, it's only due to the diligence of authors such as Piotr and the tenacity of publishers such as Philip Mantle that we get to hear about some of the more fascinating UFO-related material that exists outside of ufology's mainstream.